Here’s an unranked list of three comics I read this year. All have my strongest recommendation.

Asterios Polyp by David Mazzuchelli

A comics masterpiece that people will still be talking about in 20 years. The book reads like a fusion of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and Craig Thompson’s Blankets – the formalist mastery of the former, the emotional heft of the latter. Mazzuchelli is in absolute control of every page and panel, and te narrative builds to an emotional crescendo as surprising as it is powerful. The physical book itself deserves special attention; everything from the shape and texture of the binding and cover to the CYMK-focused color scheme of the art itself makes it an object of fetishistic beauty. When I finished the book, drained but happy, it was the endpapers that pushed me over the edge into tears. A must-read for anyone who likes words or pictures.

The Umbrella Academy: Dallas by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba

I’m on-record as to what a pleasant surprise I found the Umbrella Academy, but I still wasn’t prepared for the assured statement and good comics that is Dallas. This is a Great American Comic, willing to wrangle with big issues and bigger themes than anything else out there. Dallas is about the American obsession with (and desensitization to) violence, the psychic scars of Vietnam, and the assassination of JFK as the focal point around which the American 20th Century Experience revolves. Don’t worry, the comic still has men grafted to Martian monkeys, phase-shifting kung-fu six-year-olds, and more daddy issues than Oedipus Rex, but Dallas ups the stakes with time travel (within time travel (within time travel…)), French surrealism, and serial killers in Cinnamaroll masks. The emotional baggage of the characters gets mixed up with the emotional baggage of America and the result is a punchy, heady stew of mainstream comics at their best: fun-as-hell to read in an afternoon, but packed with ideas that resonate for weeks.

Nijigahara Holograph by Inio Asano

I read it, and then I read it again. Immediately, which I never do. Then I read it again the next day. That weekend, I bought it from Book-Off and I read it a fourth time, in Japanese. This is a good book and it deserves your attention. The level of craft and storytelling chops on display here is every bit the equal of Alan Moore at his mid-80s best – but the unification of author and artist as a single person gives this work a white-hot power beyond even Watchmen or From Hell. The tone is a cross between Mulholland Drive and It; the creature who lurks in darkness and cannot be challenged, the intrusion of the nightmare into daylight, how the sins of children become the sins of adults, and how no amount of time can ever forgive or forget the sins of the past. Also, there are lots of butterflies. There are images in this book that cannot be forgotten, juxtapositions of text and line that will explode your brain into that third place where comics happen.

Nijigahara Holograph is currently only available in scanlation and has yet to be licensed for the U.S. Read it now (then read this thread) and read it again.) Read it again when (if?) it comes to the U.S. You are going to be reading this comic for the rest of your life, and the sooner you get started, the better.

Sorry for the delay. I was rereading The Invisibles. Now I’m rerereading it. As mentioned before, these posts are going to be my musings on the series at this point in my life, rather than a “deep” reading full of ne’er-before-seen insight. If it’s annotations you want, check out Barbelith’s The Bomb or the Disinformation Guide.

This post is entirely spoiler-free; later posts will be mostly so. Some parts of this overview may be misleading, others will be outright lies. If you want the unvarnished truth then go read the books. So:

There is an eternal war between the forces of Order and Chaos that has been going on for time immemorial. On the side traditionally thought of as “good,” less traditionally as Chaos, are The Invisibles – a loosely-knit group of ontological terrorist cells dedicated to overthrowing Status Quo, freeing mankind from the mental shackles of modern society, and shooting the ever-living hell out of any ultraterrestrial beings who make the mistake of invading our physical plane. Or at least those who work for said ultraterrestrials.

And in this corner, we have the nasty beasties of the Outer Church, servants of absolute Order, total control, and the enslavement of all mankind for all eternity, forever. For argument’s sake, we’ll call them the “bad guys.”

Also also: every conspiracy theory you’ve ever heard is true; all moments in time are simultaneous; there is a red, circular satellite called BARBELiTH orbiting the dark side of the moon and sometimes it beams messages into our brains; and the world is going to end on December 22, 2012, 8:00 A.M. GMT, as the walls between self and not-self break down and all of humanity is born into the higher state of unified consciousness that, because we have to call it something, we’ll call the Supercontext.

Get ready!

There are a lot of Invisibles, but our five core characters are:

• Jack Frost, a.k.a Dane McGowan, teenaged Liverpudlian hooligan, possibly the reincarnation of the Buddha, certainly a powerful sorcerer, maybe the most powerful. Doesn’t really give two shits, though. The newest recruit.
• King Mob, de facto leader of this Invisibles cell. Wears leather, shoots guns, behaves like life is an action movie and he’s the star.
• Ragged Robin, a clown-faced red-head, Has some psychic powers. Has some other powers.
• Lord Fanny, a powerful Brazilian shaman and a fabulous dancer. Also, a transvestite.
• Boy, who is a girl.

Okay, enough background.

Your head’s like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weigh of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous little cabinet? Little bokren things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune’s all we are.
- Tom O’Bedlam, to Dane McGowan

Our story begins with Jack and his initiation into the secret world of the Invisibles. I’ve always associated strongly with Jack; we were born in the same year (1980) and, as Invisibles was set in the “present” of the book’s publication, that means Jack was always my age. During the 90s, that is; reading this series in non-real time, I can’t help but notice how young he is. Not to mention a righteous wanker. What once seemed like youthful rebellion now just comes across like being an asshole. As Tom tells him, “you think you’re an outlaw but you just do what they want you to do”; his rebellion is trapped within the superstructure of how a young, violent rebel is expected to behave. At this point in his development, Jack isn’t actually rebelling, he just thinks he’s rebelling. Mostly, he just wants to break things.

I felt a lot more sympathy for the character of Tom O’Bedlam, the older, homeless sorcerer who oversees Jack’s initiation. My first few times through the series, I felt more like Jack: “Hurry up, old man! What’s all this prattling about the nature of things? When are we going to get to the good stuff?” Now, I find him to be one of the series wisest, most sympathetic characters – in great part because he’s willing to put up with Jack’s undercooked nonsense. Tom’s ramblings about reality aren’t just for Jack, they’re for the reader: Don’t let the world distract you from what’s important. Look with your heart, not with your eyes. You are a person and you can accomplish anything - so why settle for anything less?

Tom may be mad, but he’s sane where it counts. Like the best Fools, he can say what he does because he knows he won’t be believed. The irony, as always, is that he speaks nothing but the truth.

Jack soon passes through the first stage of his initiation, puts the bulk of his attitude problem (if not his foul mouth) behind him, and meets up with the rest of the cell. Then they go to a windmill in the middle of the English countryside and sit in a circle for five issues. Okay, not really, they’re actually travelling back in time to France’s Reign of Terror to bring a psychic projection of the Marquis de Sade back to the future where he can architect a new world order based on Absolute Freedom. And to hang out with Byron and the Shelleys, because, you’ve already gone to all the trouble of travelling back to 1794, so why not?

Thus begins the series’ infamous “Arcadia” arc that nearly got the series cancelled . Truth be told, it’s difficult stuff. There’s not much action; the main characters, in the present day, are literally in an immobile trance as they project back in time. There’s a lot of talking and philosophizing. On the other hand, it’s at least interestingly difficult and thematically coherent. Furthermore, like most second arcs in Morrison’s long-form comics, it provides a secret road map to the entire series to come.

My enjoyment was helped a lot by my own expanded pool of knowledge, this time around – I knew more about the French revolution, about the historical significance and symbolic import of the guillotine, and about the Marquis de Sade and 120 Days of Sodom – thanks, Keith. I was also more willing to approach each arc of The Invisibles on its own merits – does it accomplish what it’s trying to accomplish? I mean, there’s plenty of ultradimensional warfare and time-travelling hypernarratives in the issues to come. This arc – a philosophical treatise on human freedom, the subjectivity of prisons, and the false security of either-or, us-them Manichean dichotomies – succeeds mightily. Compare the Marquis’ freedom, even imprisoned, to the self-imposed incarceration of the libertines, or the stark difference between what Robin and the Ciphermen hear during glossolalia. There’s also the dalang, a most skillful puppeteer, and the Blind Chessman, playing both sides for want of a suitable opponent.

I used to think the Blind Chessman was Satan, given his penchant for apples and affiliation with the Outer Church, but this time around I considered him as the Gnostic Christ. He claims he is “not the god of your Fathers,” and that his stories were made heresy by the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. The idea of the Gnostic Christ – a spiritual Christ dwelling within a human host, rather than a Christ divine both in flesh and spirit – resonates strongly with the series’ recurring image of a person or creature from a higher state of existence becoming “trapped” in a lower. So, I’m going with that.

Comments, please!

I’ve started rereading Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles for the first time since 2002. I’m going to blog it on a per-trade basis.

This is my fourth or fifth full reading of the series, and I’m curious to see how my feelings toward it have changed in the past few years. The series was – is – enormously influential on me, in the way that other, saner people probably feel about sacred texts. Morrison claimed that he wanted to write “a comic about everything: action, philosophy, paranoia, sex, magic, biography, travel, drugs, religion, UFO’s”; to create a “hypersigil” that encapsulated the human experience in toto and its ongoing evolution. I think a strong argument can be made that The Invisibles is the work of the 1990s – I can’t think of another book, movie or album that better encapsulates those premillenial homesick blues.

I’ve read a lot more comics – and a lot more Grant Morrison – since my last time through the series. Some of it’s great (We3, Seven Soldiers, The Filth, All-Star Superman), some of it’s not-so-great (Final Crisis, Batman). But reading so much Morrison has engrained in me a theme I feel I missed the first time around: everything has value, and that value is equal. You can see this in We3 (and earlier in Animal Man) where no distinction is made between human and animal life; in Seven Soldiers, where D-list superheroes are shown to be as great as the Justice League, and the Gods of the Fourth World are reduced to homeless vagabonds; in The Filth, where the death of a lonely, middle-aged bachelor’s cat is an event of equal pathos to the end of the world.

Even Morrison’s less successful works fail due to this eagerness to place everyone on the same pedestal. Both Final Crisis and Batman are crushed under the narrative weight of treating decades of contradictory stories from hundreds of crazy writers as all true. Identically true. And while there is a mad democratic glory to treating the Zoo Crew as Superman’s animal equals or bringing back the extraterrestrial Batman of Zur En Arrh, it makes for better meta-commentary on the nature of serialized storytelling than, well, storytelling.

Even so: it is in this spirit of narrative magnanimity I resolved to reread The Invisibles; to treat every part of the sprawling conspiracy mythos as equally true and valid. I normally skim over some parts: the Arcadia arc, anything related to the alien Greys, 70’s Brit-Cops Division X, and, well, the first 11 issues of the final volume — to get to what I internally think of as “the good stuff”: anything with Jim Crow, the end of the first volume, the Hand of Glory arc, and of course the single best last issue of anything, ever. This time around, I’m going to work hard at believing everything. At wanting to believe everything.

Impressions will be spoiler-light, but full of detail. My goal is to spark discussion amongst those who have read the series, and interest amongst those who have not.

The last great eBaying has begun.

I’ll keep selling stuff, of course, but all the really valuable low-hanging fruit has been taken care of, at this point. I’ve been giving my apartment a deep, deep cleansing and this is the last of what needs to go.

There are some rare Japanese game posters from my stay over in Japan. Genma Onimusha, Viewtiful Joe, Mushihime-sama, OUENDAN, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Shin Megami Tensei III (SIGNED!), and Digital Devil Saga. I’m particularly fond of the Genma Onimusha poster,even if because the visuals have nothing to do with the game.

I also have some rare Japanese games and goods up for sale, including some Club Nintendo products, as well as as some nifty comics collections – the full run of The Invisibles, the full run of Watchmen, and a complete set of hardcover Sandman TPBs.

The starting prices are pretty fair so get on over there and bid away!

Reading The Umbrella Academy, an Eisner-award winning 6-issue limited series from Dark Horse comics, was the most fun I’ve had with a comic in years. Period, full stop. I can’t summarize the book any better than the publisher already has, so:

In an inexplicable, worldwide event, forty-seven extraordinary children were spontaneously born by women who’d previously shown no signs of pregnancy. Millionaire inventor Reginald Hargreeves adopted seven of the children; when asked why, his only explanation was, “To save the world.” These seven children form The Umbrella Academy, a dysfunctional family of superheroes with bizarre powers. Their first adventure at the age of ten pits them against an erratic and deadly Eiffel Tower, piloted by the fearsome zombie-robot Gustave Eiffel. Nearly a decade later, the team disbands, but when Hargreeves unexpectedly dies, these disgruntled siblings reunite just in time to save the world once again.

Grant Morrison’s an unapologetic fan, and it’s easy to see why; no “superhero” book has been this consistency crazy and clever – not to be confused with Wacky! Zany! Fun! – since Morrison’s legendary Doom Patrol run. The comic’s quirky pacing, offbeat characterization, and attention to surreal detail make it read like a superhero movie as directed by Wes Anderson. Which, incidently, is exactly the tone the author was going for, so props to him.

No, more than props; an apology. See, the author of The Umbrella Chronicles is Gerard Way, lead singer of emo wunderband My Chemical Romance. And despite people whose opinions I respect speaking out in favor of The Umbrella Academy – despite the Eisner - I couldn’t bring myself to believe it was any good. It sounded too much like a rock star’s ridiculous vanity project, doomed to be mired in Coheed and Cambrian sound and fury. Well, I was wrong.

After finishing it, I went and read up on Way to try to figure out how a bratty emo kid could produce something so mind-blisteringly enjoyable. It turns out that Way holds a BA of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in NYC (check out that instructor list!), and that he spent the years before My Chemical Romance working as a comics store clerk. He clearly has the talent and the bonafides, so the fact he produced a great series shouldn’t be surprising. And yet it is.

So I feel bad that I’m prejudiced against famous people; that I assume that just because someone is on the cover of Spin and popular with 14-year-old girls he must be a vacuous, inartistic sellout. Bzzt! Celebrities are people too; if most of them are trite and boring and petty it’s only because the vast majority of people are so. But some of them are interesting, a few of them are nerds, and at least one of them had a great comic up there in his guylinered noggin. The good news is it managed to escape, so you can join me in having your preconceptions proven delightfully, ambitiously wrong.

I recently learned of It’s Better With Your Shoes Off, a collection of cartoons first published in 1955. The author, Anne Cleveland, spent several years living in Japan in the 1950s with her husband, a British trader. She took her experiences and turned them into a series of charming cartoons that poke good-natured fun at the daily foibles of living in Japan as a foreigner. Though out of print now, the book was relatively successful at the time and went into nearly twenty printings.

The artistry is really top-notch, with a clean and dynamic line, and the humor, while slightly dated by the accompanying text, is still easily understood, frequently hilarious, and thankfully free of racial stereotypes. Copies can be easily found online for less than $10 (including shipping). Any foreigner who has spent time living in Japan would absolutely love a copy of this book.

Mike Lynch has scanned in several pages at his blog. Check ‘em out!

The Scott Pilgrim movie rounded out the rest of its principal cast this week, moving it from “probably happening” to “almost definitely happening”; pre-production means nothing in this town. Most of the new cast seems pretty spot-on, and I’m even willing to forgive Michael Cera in the lead role, as long as he expands his range — and puts the past few months of karate lessons to good use.

Director Edgar Wright (Shawn of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) posted a picture on his blog of the movies he brought with him to Toronto. Judging from that photo, he intends to make a kung-fu anime musical concert character-driven superhero exploitation film.

…I’m so glad the director understands the source material.

I dressed up as Scott McCloud’s Zot! villain 9-Jack-9 for Halloween. This is the latest in my popular “awesome, yet unrecognizable” costume series. (Though, three people totally recognized me!) I’m extremely happy with how this turned out.

I learned a few important lessons from this costume, most importantly: don’t choose a costume that prevents you from drinking at a Halloween party. You will take your mask off twenty minutes into the party, and spend the rest of the evening explaining that no, you are not the Music Man, Dick Van Dyke from Mary Poppins, or Tucker Carlson.

Thanks to Joe for taking such nice photos.

Phonogram by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie

Short review: Phonogram author Kieron Gillen invented New Games Journalism. NGJ is bollocks. Phonogram is good enough that I forgive Gillen for NGJ.

Phonogram is the story of Dave Kohl, unlikeable bastard and powerful phonomancer. Remember those times when you heard a song and it just plain changed your life? You might have been filled with inexplicable joy and wonder. You might have experienced a sudden oracular divination. You might have just be hypnotized for two hours as you listened to the song on “repeat.” Music is power, and phonomancers use this power to weave eldritch spells of weird intent.

This actually makes a lot of sense.

Kohl’s phonomancer identity is centered around Britannia, goddess of Britpop, risen in 1964 and returned in 1995. It was this second renaissance, during Kohl’s formative teenage years, that opened Kohl’s eyes to the power of pop music. But now someone or something is messing with the timeline, causing Kohl’s memory and taste to get all jumbled up and threatening to undo the very foundations of the British scene. So Kohl has to find out who, and why, and ideally stop them.

Phonomancer is extremely specifically about the Britpop summers of 1995 and 1996, when Blur vs. Oasis was more important than any conflict in the Middle East, and Pulp released Different Class and it became impossible to remember what music was like before Common People. The book is absolutely steeped in references to minor and sub-minor bands from the era. Each of the six issue covers is a subversive riff on a crucial album from the era (Wikipedia annotates). The OCD-level name-dropping would be obnoxious, save for two factors: a witty glossary for us poor lost Americans, and the fact that Phonogram is only using Britpop as the canvas for its tale of music, obsession, and nostalgia gone wrong. The authors have joked in interviews that were Phonogram to be made into a movie, it would be about grunge and set in America–but have also added that the story would lose anything in translation.

Like all good music, Britpop changed the lives of Phonogram’s characters. But was Britpop about anything? Or was it just about selling lots of records to a lot of people hopped up, as Cocker put it, on E’s and whizz? That’s the fundamental question of the story: how can you center your life around something that, in the grand scheme of things, might not be important?

Manic Street Preacher’s The Holy Bible was a pivotal Britpop album that never saw U.S. release due to the untimely disappearance of their guitarist, Richey Edwards. The line “I know I believe in nothing, but it is my nothing” comes from that album’s “Faster.” Before reading Phonogram, that line struck me as unbelievably nihilistic. How can you believe in “nothing”? More importantly, why? But now, I see it as unbelievably positive, an affirmation that the sheer idea of belief is more important that the object. Phonogram is about believing music has that power.

I should mention that I started another blog with some friends a few weeks ago. Thorp Force Five is a daily love letter to the most surreal and humorous daily comic strip in the newspaper. That strip is, of course, Gil Thorp.

Go, now, before the Syndicate takes them down. You have maybe 48 hours.

Lasagna Cat: A Tribute to Jim Davis

I resolved, this New Year, to post more in this blog. “At all” would be a good start. I figured a good place to start would be to document the year in media; to write something, anything, about every book I read, movie I see, or game I finish. We’ll see how long this lasts. 7 days, so far.

I Killed Adolf Hitler by Jason

A story about an assassin who travels back in time to kill Adolf Hitler and botches things rather badly. Hitler steals the time machine and zaps himself back to the present, leaving our stranded assassin to return to the present the long way around. It sounds like a dark comedy, and it is, but it has a secret dramatic intent, and by the end of its slim 48-pages, has shown itself to not be about time travel or Hitler at all, but rather the daily decisions we make about how to live our lives. This is the first work I’ve read by Jason, and I was rather surprised by how emotionally affecting it was. His simple animal characters act like characters in an Ibsen play, their shallow dialogues revealing deep, well-timed emotional truths they themselves may not be aware of.

Why Are You Doing This? by Jason

I liked I Killed Adolf Hitler so much I ran out and immediately bought another of Jason’s books. This one is a noirish “wrong man” mystery, about an innocent at the wrong place at the wrong time, and the web of mystery and murder that follows. It also asks what makes for a life well-lived: the stories that you can share with others? Or the stories that others can tell about you? Like the other book, this one packs an emotional wallop into its final pages.

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

The new gold standard in autobiographical memoir comics, though for my money, Craig Thompson’s Blankets still can’t be beat. I chalk up my preferences to the simple fact that I have lots of experience with being a confused lovelorn teenager, and very little being a confused lovelorn lesbian with a closeted father. It’s good, and the portrait it paints of a messed up family and the fun(eral) home that keeps them together is fascinating, but the whole thing left me feeling a little estranged. What I love about Blankets is the messy rush of emotion running through every line on every page; the feeling that Craig Thompson had to put his pen to paper or he would die. Bechdel’s work, in contrast, is intelligent, erudite, and full of razor-honed observations. In the end, the work felt as distancing as the baroque ornamentation in her father’s OCD-fueled mansion. honed to a razor edge. Excellent art, but lacking in heart.

The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck by Don Rosa

Did you like Duck Tales as a child? Of course you did, because you are a reader of impeccable taste. Don Rosa writes stories about Scrooge McDuck that will make you feel like you’re a kid again; more precisely, like an adult who feels like a kid again. His stories are full of adventure and globe-trotting, but also well-researched historically and completely faithful to Carl Barks’ original 1960s stories. A book that manages to be light without also being slight, and that does an amazingly entertaining job of explaining just exactly how Scrooge became the richest duck in the world. Answer: by being awesome.